diff --git a/web/src/components/Editor/EditorCore.tsx b/web/src/components/Editor/EditorCore.tsx
index c3897c8..b596914 100644
--- a/web/src/components/Editor/EditorCore.tsx
+++ b/web/src/components/Editor/EditorCore.tsx
@@ -1106,7 +1106,17 @@ export function EditorCore({
           // actually knows (a real gloss or definition), so accidental lookups of
           // typos or proper nouns don't clutter the garden. Looking words up IS
           // the data source; this costs the writer nothing.
-          const known = !!info.gloss || info.definitions.length > 0
+          //
+          // "Knows" has to include the reverse reading, or a word of her own
+          // language can never be captured at all: the forward lookup of "carro"
+          // answers with nothing, and everything the card shows her comes out of
+          // `reverse`. Before Phase 28 that was academic, because every document
+          // was English; on a Portuguese document it silently emptied the garden
+          // of every word she actually met. Caught in a browser 2026-07-29 —
+          // right-clicking "carro" showed a full card and stored nothing.
+          const rev = info.reverse
+          const known =
+            !!info.gloss || info.definitions.length > 0 || !!rev?.gloss || (rev?.definitions?.length ?? 0) > 0
           // Reflect the saved state optimistically so the heart shows 💚 the
           // moment a known word loads, rather than flashing 🤍 until the capture
           // round-trips. vocabId is filled in when recordVocab returns.
@@ -1116,12 +1126,18 @@ export function EditorCore({
             .recordVocab({
               word: range.word,
               gloss: info.gloss,
-              definition: info.definitions[0]?.definition ?? '',
+              // `definition` is the English sense the review card falls back to
+              // when there is no gloss in her language — and for a word that *is*
+              // her language, the reverse gloss is exactly that: "carro" →
+              // "car; automobile; machine". The Portuguese monolingual definition
+              // underneath it explains the word in the language she already knows
+              // it in, which is not what a flashcard is for.
+              definition: info.definitions[0]?.definition ?? rev?.gloss ?? '',
               // The garden's pronunciation field holds whichever this word has:
               // IPA for an English word, pinyin for a Chinese one. Both answer
               // the same question on a review card — how do I say this — and a
               // second column would only be a second thing to keep in sync.
-              phonetic: pinyin || info.phonetic,
+              phonetic: pinyin || info.phonetic || rev?.phonetic || '',
               example,
               doc_id: docId,
             })